Here is what we know so far from today's build, and the previous build.
- Healing Touch - removed
- Living Seed - removed
- 40 +Crit effect on Regrowth - removed
- Tranquility changed to have HoT scaling, where every subsequent tick heals for more than the initial tick.
- Tranquility loses casting while moving (they have said there are no plans to enable that).
- Displacer Beast - removed and replaced with Tiger's Dash (discussed at length in other thread).
- Stonebark and Germination are swapping places in the talent tree
- Flourish is reworked to essentially combine the current effects of Essence of G'Hanir and Flourish into a single ability with a 90 second CD and 8 second duration
- Abundance is reworked with the removal of Healing Touch. It now gives 6% Crit and 6% mana reduction to Regrowth per active Rejuv.
What are people's thoughts on these changes. Here are mine.
- I think they are removing too many spells overall from a spec that already has a reputation of being simpler than other specs. Healing Touch is gone. If you want to keep Germination and want to use Tiger's Dash, you lose 3 more things that are currently buttons (EoG, Flourish, and Displacer Beast). I think cutting us down to just 1 single target direct heal (especially when every other healer is keeping two) just makes our toolkit too bare, and it feels like another rotational spell needs to be put in there.
- The talent changes effectively limit your options/pigeon hole you into a raiding spec or a Mythic+ spec. Assuming Cultivation remains the go to talent like it is in Legion, if you want to keep Germination (which you will 100% have to in 5 mans at least), you basically are stuck with no cooldowns other than Tranq. If you want to have access to a major personal throughput CD in raids, you lose the spot healing/debuff healing flexibility of having Germination. It feels like it just limits your toolkit/options and makes the spec too straightforward.
- The benefit is that you at least will be able to have either Spring Blossoms or Inner Peace in raids with no sacrifice. However, those are both passive talents that lack any real play style to them, so it doesn't really fill the gap.
- The new Abundance probably becomes a go to 5 man and PvP talent, but is going to remain close to a dead talent in raiding. The number of Rejuvs that you will have to have out to make it worthwhile, with the other GCDs that need to be spent on LB, WG, SM, Efflo, etc., is going to leave very little time to take advantage of using buffed Regrowth heavily.
- I strongly suspect that the raid build will be CW/Cult/Spring Blossoms/Flourish, and the M+ build will be Abundance/Cult/Stonebark/Germination